He Became Only A Prime Minister

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31113, 16 July 1966, Page 4

He Became Only A Prime Minister

[Reviewed by A.R.] Alfred Deakin. A Biography. By J. A. La Nauze. Melbourne University Press. 2 Vols. 732 pp. In the spacious and more leisurely days of the last century, two and even three volume biographies of great men were frequently published and read. Nowadays, few people devote the time that was once given to reading, and publishing houses are afraid that two-volume works will be unprofitable

ventures. Consequently, outside the United States, two volume biographies are practically unknown. The Melbourne University Press is, therefore, to be congratulated on its courage and sense in doing justice to the person of Alfred Deakin and to the writing of Professor La Nauze in publishing its two volume biography of Deakin, without too much regard for the financial consequences. Alfred Deakin was a most extraordinary man. One of the great workers for the federation of the Australian states into the Commonwealth, three times Prime Minister of the Commonwealth of Australia in the first decade of this century, a lawyer, an able journalist, an orator, a mystic, and, for a time, a spiritualist, he had goals and aims the realisation of which eluded him. As Professor La Nauze puts it in this splendid biographical study: “He had wished to be variously a writer, a critic, a teacher of mankind. He saw himself as an intellectual with a mission. He was to succeed only in becoming a Prime Minister.” This nice touch of irony may appear to the casual reader as merely the airing of a personal prejudice by a university professor, allergic to the politicians of mediocrity, but, in fact, it is a well justified conclusion. Deakin kept a very full set of diaries or personal notebooks in which he entered, not only his thoughts in all sorts of subjects, but even his prayers to the God in whom he confided his aspirations and beliefs as he revealed them to no man during his lifetime. These notebooks have helped his biographer to improve on the earlier study of Deakin by Walter Murdoch, written in 1923, and to give us both a most intimate picture of the real Deakin as well as a definitive study of his political career in the Commonwealth period. Professor La Nauze speaks with authority when he writes of Deakin; “After he had found his vocation in journalism and politics he continued to look wistfully to the roles, literary, religious, philosophical, but always didactic, which introspective habit and a large command over words had led him to believe he was fitted to play.”

Born in Melbourne in 1856. the son of a “storekeeper and clerk” who made no fortune from the gold rushes, Alfred Deakin (“a plausible guess” suggests the “Alfred” expressed admiration for Tennyson) early became a tremendous reader and a fluent conversationalist.

Encouraged by David Syme, the autocratic proprietor of the Melbourne “Age” for whom he had begun to write a regular column, Deakin entered politics and was elected to the Victorian Assembly while still under 23. His dramatic resignation on a point of honour, when it was stated that there had been a shortage of voting papers at one polling booth, placed him on a plane above the ordinary run of seekers for political power. Although defeated at the new election, he was back in office within two years and from 1883 to 1890 he was a Minister of the Crown of Victoria. He was responsible for the Factories and Shops Act of 1885, for the, study and development of irrigation schemes for the arid regions of his state, and for many of the more important planks in the platform of the Victorian Liberals. In 1887, he represented his state at the Colonial Conference where he made a great impression by his expression of genuinely Australian views, and especially on colonial and Pacific questions.

Deakin’s contributions to the growth of a federal movement which eventually ushered in the Commonwealth of Australia was already well known. His own brilliant study, “The Federal Story,” published long after his death, is a sheer delight to students of the subject, not least because of its illuminating descriptions of Reid and other characters of the period. Professor La Nauze holds that “Deakin was indubitably the central figure, the very symbol of the federal cause, in the campaign for the bill in Victoria.” On the inauguration of the Commonwealth on January 1, 1901, Deakin emerged as one of the more important Commonwealth politicians and Ministers. Conscious of the need to build an Australian nation, he made many notable speeches, wellchosen extracts from which are quoted in this biography, and never hesitated to encourage the writers and artists who were revealing distinctively Australian qualities.

In September, 1903, Deakin became Prime Minister and Minister for External Affairs. Although dependent on the preservation of a coalition, he spoke and acted boldly when the occasion appeared to demand vigorous action, but the task of reconciling naturallyopposed groups was a difficult one. The record of his Prime Ministerships in 1903-4, 190508, and 1909-10, is most competently and fairly set down in the second volume of this admirable biography. In the building of an Australian nation, in establishing in both London and Paris the fact that Australians had a real interest in the New Hebrides, in developing a tradition of concern for the natives in New Guinea, in solving problems of defence and of imperial relations and in coping with a host of internal problems relating to the federal constitution and to the judiciary, Deakin played a notable part. Deakin was at one and the same time an Australian nationalist and an imperialist. He could not escape being influenced by the imperial federation movement, although he eventually came out with astonishing modern ideas for a British Commonwealth of Nations, in which he favoured an imperial secretariat, an idea which has only now been brought to fruition. His physical and mental decline into a somewhat pathetic old age makes sad reading, but he was by no means the only political leader to give so unsparingly of his energies that some weakening of both body and mind were inevitable. Professor La Nauze. forImerly Ernest Scott Professor of History in the University of Melbourne and now Professor of History in the Research School of Social Sciences at Canberra, has written an im-

portant and outstandingly successful biography. A thorough researcher, a perfectionist in his approach to his own writing, and an impressively able historian in his own right, in the future he will be best known for this biography of Deakin. He has not followed a strictly chronological account of Deakin’s life, preferring to develop fully particular themes or facets of Deakin’s many activities. Sometimes, he may appear to spend too long in dealing with conflicting sources or controversial points, but there can be no doubting the quality of the finished book. Conscious of the “elusive mystery” of Deakin’s personality, he reveals something of his own philosophy and, while scrupulously honest and objective, pays his own tribute to the subject of his years of study: “Most historians know very well that they would be utterly incompetent as politicians but they are inclined to assume that politicians would not perform brilliantly as academics. Deakin’s is an embarrassing case for the academic historian: a politician who was his superior in lecturing, in breadth of reading and as a writer.” Professor La Nauze’s readers will learn much Australian history painlessly in the course of reading this biography, e.g. on the importance of the old Protection versus Free Trade controversy, on the vagueness of early Labour Party “socialism,” and on the various historical situations in which Deakin took his decisions. The Deakin who emerges from these pages is something more than an intellectual who was also a politician. He had generous instincts and habits, he was charming to the point of being known as “Affable Alfred,” but he was also a complex personality who was both dreamer and man of action. That he was a first-class journalist is

shown by the fact (the subject of a full chapter) that he was for over thirteen years the anonymous Australian correspondent of the London “Morning Post,” and this for the years when he was Prime Minister. For a shorter period he contributed to the “National Review” in London as well as to the “Age” in Melbourne. His purpose in writing so much was partly to give himself the pleasure he derived from writing and partly to be the propagandist or interpreter of Australia and “colonial nationalism” for English readers. But what an amazing thing it was for a political leader and Minister to have contributed something like a million words in his “Letters” to the “Morning Post”!

Again and again, in his note-books, Deakin acknowledged his indebtedness to the best poets and writers. What other politician of his stature could record, “The intoxication of public success, the occasional content with public acts or refusals, the joy in work done as well as one can, the flush of gratified vanity at giving pleasure or using power effectively are keen and sometimes passionate but they fall both in number and intensity below the transports I have received from books”; Deakin was almost certainly too much a lover of philosophy and literature to be completely successful as a politician or consistently striking as a leader. But his friend, Sir Edmund Barton, himself a Prime Minister and a Judge, was right to praise his “purity and nobility” and to claim that his image “was like the effigy of some noble knight of the days of chivalry.” His biographer also rightly holds that “Of all men yet concerned in Australian politics, he is the last who should rest, neatly-labelled, in an historical pigeon-hole."